Icons: It's still orange
My last post shared some of our conceptual designs of the feed icon and expressed some of the criteria that we are using to select the right icon. Several of the comments liked icon #4 simply because it looked liked the Firefox icon, and many (like this one) …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's RSS team is picking its feed icon in public: an earlier post on the same blog showed conceptual designs and the selection criteria, and the comment thread answered with a clear signal — readers favored icon #4 largely because it resembled the Firefox icon. This follow-up settles the color question: the orange stays, meaning Microsoft's feed surfaces will speak the same visual language Mozilla's browser has already taught web users to click.
First-order effects
- Users of Microsoft's feed tooling and of Firefox now learn one orange glyph instead of two competing marks — the commenters on Microsoft's own blog effectively nominated Firefox's icon as the reference design.
Second-order effects
- Publishers gain a single recognizable button to place on sites regardless of which browser or reader their audience uses, cutting the cost of explaining feeds; Mozilla gets its icon reinforced as the de facto standard at no promotional cost of its own.
Third-order effects
- If both vendors ship converging orange icons, the mark becomes shared infrastructure neither company owns — a reusable artifact whose recognition value persists outside any single vendor, putting preservation pressure on whoever redesigns their browser chrome next.
The trend: Browser and platform vendors are converging on a common visual vocabulary for feeds, converting one vendor's icon into unowned, industry-wide shorthand.